A Troubleshooting ‘Wingman’ Plotting Romney’s Trajectory

Bob White with Mitt Romney, center. Mr. White, whom Mr. Romney hired at Bain Consulting in 1981, jokes that his job is “Friend of Candidate.”Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times NYTCREDIT: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

BOSTON — When Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital first came under assault, his beleaguered campaign staff turned to Bob White, an informal adviser. He quickly recruited researchers to conduct a deal-by-deal autopsy, searching for uplifting examples to share with voters to counter rivals’ accounts of exploitative ones.

When Mr. Romney’s team of longtime aides risked becoming insular, Mr. White navigated a minefield of office politics to ensure that Ed Gillespie, a veteran Republican operative brought in from the outside, had a major hand in strategy decisions.

And when Mr. Romney was portrayed as a robotic Mr. Fix-It, unwilling to tell his personal story, Mr. White pushed to recast him as a compassionate church leader, selfless neighbor and adoring father.

Mr. White, a former college hockey player with a pronounced Boston accent, has emerged as a singular force within the Romney campaign. A designated troubleshooter and in-house consultant, he helped steady a wobbly candidacy and reverse its trajectory in recent weeks, according to interviews with a dozen Romney aides and advisers.

Little seen and little known to the public, Mr. White — a multimillionaire businessman who has the nebulous title of campaign chairman and accepts no salary — plays an outsize role. Variously described by aides as the candidate’s alter ego, his aide-de-camp, his genial enforcer and his gut check, Mr. White gained his stature entirely through his long relationship with Mr. Romney, who hired him 31 years ago for a management consulting job. His place in a Romney White House, should there be one, is all but guaranteed.

“Bob’s voice in Romneyworld carries enormous weight, both internally and externally,” said Spencer Zwick, the campaign’s finance chief. “People crave his approval and his sign-off. They know Mitt listens to him.”

Their partnership is devoted and durable, with Mr. Romney relying on Mr. White as an informal adviser at every stage of his career: Bain, the Massachusetts governorship, the Olympics and both presidential campaigns. Aides say it falls to him to channel what he sees as the real Mitt Romney.

“That’s not Mitt,” Mr. White is known to say at strategy meetings about a proposal, at times directly asking Mr. Romney, “Are you really comfortable with this plan?”

Inside a campaign that long favored hammering on President Obama and playing down the details of Mr. Romney’s biography, Mr. White has pushed for transparency, arguing that the benefits outweighed the risks. He advocated that Mr. Romney discuss his Mormon faith, publicly embrace his financial success and release his recent income taxes, taking to a whiteboard to tutor a campaign media relations team befuddled by the candidate’s far-flung investments and trusts.

Aides, who say nothing in the campaign is achieved without exhaustive consensus, said Mr. Romney’s emergence in the final stretch of the race as a pragmatist, talking about his charitable acts, business career and record as governor, bore Mr. White’s fingerprints.

He “wants people to see the Mitt Romney he knows,” said Ron Kaufman, a top campaign adviser. “He wants to give people a reason to go to the polls.”

Neither Mr. White nor Mr. Romney would talk about their relationship for this article. But by granting Mr. White access to every meeting and any aide, Mr. Romney has revealed something about his own leadership style, suggesting the limits of his faith in political operatives and his enduring belief in the problem-solving powers of fellow management consultants. In Mr. White, Mitt Romney has, in a sense, found his very own Mitt Romney.

At Romney for President headquarters here, Mr. White peppers advisers with provocative questions, tests their assumptions and challenges their plans, just as he and Mr. Romney did at Bain Consulting. “Why are we running this ad now?” he has asked. “Is this the best use of money?”

When he learned that the fund-raising team was leaning against participating in the federal government’s public financing program — it figured the program was impractical since Mr. Obama had opted out to raise unlimited amounts from donors — Mr. White said he could not support that position until team members had backed it up with a thorough analysis. They dutifully did, and the campaign rejected public financing.

Thinking like a consultant, he urged that the advertising team find ways to work with outside experts to get new ideas. And he created Project Patriot, a way to use the talents of big donors for more than writing checks; Charles Schwab and James J. Liautaud, the founder of the Jimmy John’s sandwich chain, among others, are now deployed to make the case for Mr. Romney to groups of businesspeople around the country.

Mr. White may not apply the same cleareyed scrutiny to his friend the candidate, though, that he does to campaign operations. At least publicly, he speaks of Mr. Romney with near reverence, unable or unwilling to find fault.

Mr. White, a silver-haired father of six, has a barking laugh and an easy grin. His lucrative career at Bain, where he is still an investor, has given him the freedom to help out Mr. Romney and pursue enthusiasms, like his part ownership of the Boston Celtics. But he grew up far from the wealthy Michigan suburbs and elite prep schools of Mr. Romney’s youth.

The son of an Irish Catholic machinist and a telephone service representative in Woburn, Mass., he was the first member of his family to attend college — Bowdoin, on financial aid. He was the goalie on the hockey team, “which at Bowdoin is like being the starting quarterback on a college football team,” said David Binswanger, a classmate.

But Mr. White stood out for blending in, splitting his time between the jocks and the A students. “You would have expected somebody like that to be the ego, or the big man on campus,” Mr. Binswanger said.

Photo

Mr. White in a meeting in 2007 during Mr. Romney’s first bid for the White House.Credit
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

That understated quality, colleagues said, drew Mr. Romney to him. After recruiting Mr. White to Bain Consulting in 1981, Mr. Romney made him the first employee of Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded three years later. Mr. White’s trademark, then and now: making change without making waves. Respected and well liked, Mr. White generally gets his way. “He has a very light touch,” said Mr. Gillespie, the senior campaign adviser.

Mr. Romney relied on Mr. White to recruit top campaign staff for his governor’s race in 2002, intervene in delicate personnel problems in the governor’s office and lay the groundwork for his first presidential campaign.

Mr. White traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire in 2006 and 2007, handing out $600 checks from Mr. Romney’s political action committee to local candidates and talking up the national prospects of a Massachusetts governor most of them had never heard of.

Tom Rath, a longtime strategist in New Hampshire, recalled Mr. White showing up in a blue blazer and gray slacks seeking a tutorial in how to organize a presidential campaign. “Tell me how this works,” he said.

Mr. Romney gave a toast and a reading at Mr. White’s wedding; Mr. White takes Mr. Romney to Boston sporting events when he is in town. “I think he’s appreciative of the success he’s gotten with Mitt,” Mr. Binswanger said of Mr. White. “He thinks Mitt is one of the great human beings in the country.”

Mr. Romney, in his book “Turnaround,” was effusive in his praise. “Bob,” he wrote, “had saved my bacon time and again in my career.”

Campaign aides said Mr. White has pulled off the tricky job of being Mr. Romney’s close friend while earning the trust of the candidate’s staff, by making clear that much of what he learns will remain confidential. He works from an office on the second floor of the Romney campaign office in Boston’s North End, where a whiteboard is covered in handwritten charts.

But he is frequently on the road, sitting a row behind Mr. Romney on the candidate’s plane, offering jokes and counsel. He has a knack for figuring out when Mr. Romney is feeling disconnected from headquarters and should be looped in on a conference call, or when he needs a break in his tight schedule.

And if Mr. Romney makes it to the White House? Mr. White is on the team planning the transition, and aides cannot imagine that Mr. Romney would not turn to him again.

Mr. White has at least contemplated a role for himself in the capital. Back in the 1990s, he interviewed a job candidate at Bain Capital named Marc Walpow, who said he asked Mr. White what he wanted to do after his time at the firm.

Mr. Walpow still remembers his answer: “I might go to Washington with Mitt.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 28, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Troubleshooting ‘Wingman’ Plotting Romney’s Trajectory. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe